Discuss the concept of liberty in the writings of Isaiah Berlin.
Isaiah Berlin was born in 1909 in Riga (then capital of the
Govenorate of Livonia within the Russian Empire, now capital of Latvia), the
sole surviving child (after a stillborn daughter) of Mendel Berlin, a
prosperous Russian Jewish timber merchant, and his wife Marie, née Volshonok.
In 1915 the family moved to the forestry town of Andreapol’ (then in Russia’s
Pskov Govenorate), and in 1916 to Petrograd (now St Petersburg), where they
remained through both the Russian Revolutions of 1917, which Isaiah would
remember witnessing. Despite early harassment by the Bolsheviks, the family was
permitted to return to Riga with Latvian citizenship in 1920; from there they
emigrated, in 1921, to Britain. They lived in and around London; Discuss the concept of liberty in the writings of Isaiah Berlin. Isaiah
attended St Paul’s School and Corpus Christi College, Oxford, where he studied
Greats (classical languages, ancient history, and philosophy) and PPE
(philosophy, politics and economics), taking Firsts in both. In 1932 he was
appointed to a lectureship at New College; an equivalent year he became the
primary Jew to be elected to a Prize Fellowship in the least Souls, considered
one among the very best accolades in British academic life.
Throughout the 1930s Berlin was deeply involved within the
development of what became referred to as Oxford philosophy, or ordinary
language philosophy; his friends and colleagues included J. L. Austin, A. J.
Ayer and Stuart Hampshire, all of whom met regularly (with others) in Berlin’s
rooms to debate philosophy. However, he also evinced an early interest during a
more historical approach to philosophy, and in social and political orientation
, Discuss the concept of liberty in the writings of Isaiah Berlin. reflected in his lectures and reviews of the 1930s, also as in his
intellectual biography of Marx (1939), still in print, in its fifth edition (2013),
over eighty years later.
During the Second war Berlin served in British Information
Services in ny City (1940–2) and at British Embassy in Washington, DC (1942–6),
where he was liable for drafting weekly reports on the American political
scene. For four months in 1945–6 he visited the Soviet Union: his meetings
there with surviving but persecuted members of the Russian intelligentsia,
particularly the poets Anna Akhmatova and Pasternak , reinforced his staunch
opposition to Communism, and had a formative influence on his future
intellectual agenda. After the war he returned to Oxford. Although he continued
to show and write of philosophy throughout the later 1940s and into the first
1950s, his interests had shifted to the history of ideas, particularly Russian
ideas, Marxist and other socialist theories, and therefore the Enlightenment
and its critics. Discuss the concept of liberty in the writings of Isaiah Berlin. He also began to publish widely-read articles on contemporary
political and cultural trends, political ideology, and therefore the internal
workings of the Soviet Union . In 1950, election to a search fellowship in the
least Souls allowed him to devote himself more fully to his historical,
political and literary interests, which lay well outside the mainstream of
philosophy because it was then practised and taught at Oxford. He was, however,
one among the primary of the founding generation of Oxford philosophers to form
regular visits to American universities, and played a crucial part in spreading
‘Oxford philosophy’ to the USA.
In 1957, a year after he had married Aline Halban (née de
Gunzbourg), Berlin was elected Chichele Professor of Social and political
orientation at Oxford (his inaugural lecture, delivered in 1958, was Two
Concepts of Liberty). Later in 1957 he was knighted. He resigned his chair in
1967, the year after becoming founding President of Wolfson College, Oxford
(which he essentially created), retiring in 1975. In his later years he hoped
to write down a serious work on the history of European Romanticism, but this
hope was unfulfilled. From 1966 to 1971 he was also a professor of Humanities
at the town University of latest York, and he served as President of British
Academy from 1974 to 1978. Collections of his writings, edited by Henry Hardy
(sometimes with a co-editor), began appearing in 1978: there are, to date,
fourteen such volumes (plus new editions of 4 works published previously by
Berlin), also as an anthology, Discuss the concept of liberty in the writings of Isaiah Berlin. the right Study of Mankind, and a four-volume
edition of his letters. Berlin received the Agnelli, Erasmus and Lippincott
Prizes for his work on the history of ideas, and therefore the Jerusalem Prize
for his lifelong defence of civil liberties, also as numerous honorary degrees.
He died in 1997.
An early influence on Berlin was a waning British Idealism,
as expounded by T. H. Green, Bernard Bosanquet and F. H. Bradley. While an
undergraduate, Berlin was converted to the Realism of G. E. Moore and John Cook
Wilson. By the time he began teaching philosophy he had joined a replacement
generation of rebellious empiricists, a number of whom (most notably A. J.
Ayer) embraced the positivist doctrines of the Vienna Circle and Wittgenstein’s
earlier writings. Although Berlin was always sceptical towards positivism , its
suspicion of metaphysical claims and its preoccupation with the character and
authority of data strongly influenced his early philosophical enquiries. Discuss the concept of liberty in the writings of Isaiah Berlin. These,
combined together with his historical bent, led him back to the study of
earlier British empiricists, particularly Berkeley and Hume, on whom he
lectured within the 1930s and late 1940s, and about whom he contemplated
writing books (which never materialised).
Berlin was also influenced by Kant and his successors. His
first philosophical mentor was an obscure Russian Jewish Menshevik émigré named
Solomon Rachmilevich, who had studied philosophy at several German
universities, and who introduced Berlin to the good ideological quarrels of
Russian history, also on the history of German philosophy since Kant. Later, at
Oxford, R. G. Collingwood fostered Berlin’s interest within the history of
ideas, introducing him especially to such founders of historicism as
Giambattista Vico and J. G. Herder. Collingwood also reinforced Berlin’s belief
– heavily influenced by Kant – within the importance to human lifetime of the
essential concepts and categories in terms of which citizenry organise and
analyse their experience (see further 2.1 and note 2).
While performing on his biography of Marx within the mid
1930s, Berlin found the works of two Russian thinkers who would be important
influences on his political and historical outlook. one among these was
Alexander Herzen, who became a hero, and to whom Berlin would sometimes
attribute many of his own beliefs about history, politics and ethics. the
opposite was the Russian Marxist publicist and historian of philosophy G. V.
Plekhanov. Despite his opposition to Marxism, Berlin admired and praised
Plekhanov both as a person and as a historian of ideas. it had been initially
by reading Plekhanov’s writings that Berlin took an interest within the
naturalistic, empiricist and materialist thinkers of the Enlightenment, also as
their Idealist and historicist critics. Discuss the concept of liberty in the writings of Isaiah Berlin. Both Herzen and Plekhanov fuelled
Berlin’s absorption within the political debates of nineteenth- and early
twentieth-century Russian liberals and radicals of varied stripes, which
successively informed his concern with both the philosophy of history and
therefore the ethics of political action.
During the Second war , separated from his Oxford
philosophical brethren, and exposed to political action, Berlin began to drift
apart from his early philosophical concerns. His doubts were encouraged by a
gathering with the Harvard logician H. M. Sheffer, who asserted that genuine
increase in knowledge was possible only in such hybrid subfields of philosophy
as logic and psychology. His meeting with Sheffer led Berlin to understand that
he lacked the eagerness and therefore the belief in his own ability to continue
pursuing pure philosophy. He concluded that as knowledgeable philosopher (as he
then understood that role) he would make no original contributions, and would
end his life knowing no quite he did when he began. He therefore determined to
modify to the history of ideas, during which (he believed) originality was less
essential, and which might allow him to find out quite he already knew.
Berlin’s approach to the history of ideas would, however, remain deeply
informed by his philosophical persona, also as by his politics . His historical
work was, in effect, the practice of philosophy during a historical key.
By the first 1950s Berlin’s central beliefs had crystallised
from the confluence of his philosophical preoccupations, historical studies,
and political and moral commitments and anxieties; and his major ideas were
either already fully formed, or developing. Such essays of the late 1950s as
Two Concepts of Liberty served because the occasion for a synthesis and
solidification of his thoughts. Berlin had always been a liberal; but from the
first 1950s the defence of liberalism became central to his intellectual
concerns. This defence was, characteristically, closely associated with his
moral beliefs and to his preoccupation with the character and role of values in
human life. within the early 1960s Berlin’s focus moved from the more political
concerns that occupied him within the 1950s to an examination of the character
of the humanities. Throughout the 1950s and 1960s he was performing on the
history of ideas, and from the mid 1960s nearly all of his writings took the
shape of essays during this field, particularly on the Romantic and reactionary
critics of the Enlightenment. within the final decades of his life Berlin
continued to refine and re-articulate his ideas, and particularly his
formulation of pluralism; but his course was set, and he appears to possess
been little suffering from later intellectual developments.
Berlin’s approach combined a sceptical empiricism with
neo-Kantianism to supply a defence of philosophy. Like Vico and Wilhelm
Dilthey, also as neo-Kantians like Heinrich Rickert and Wilhelm Windelband,
Berlin insisted on the elemental difference between the sciences and therefore
the humanities. He classed philosophy among the humanities, but even there its
status was unique. Those working in other fields aimed to get authoritative
methods for acquiring knowledge of the themes to which they were devoted.
Philosophy, however, was for Berlin concerned with questions which not only
couldn't at the present be answered, except for which no clearly proper method
of discovering a solution was known (see e.g. ‘The Purpose of Philosophy’ in
1978b and 2000a).
In the case of non-philosophical questions, albeit the
solution is unknown, the means for locating the solution is understood , or
accepted, by most of the people . Thus questions of empirical fact are often
answered by observation. Other questions are often answered deductively, by
pertaining to established rules: this is often the case, for instance , with
mathematics, grammar and symbolic logic . for instance , albeit we don't know
the answer to a difficult mathematical problem, we do know the principles and
techniques that ought to lead us to the solution .
According to Berlin, philosophy concerns itself with
questions of a special, distinctive character. To such questions not only are
the answers not known, but neither are the means for arriving at answers, or
the standards of judgement by which to guage a suggested answer. Thus the
questions ‘How long does it fancy drive from x to y?’ or ‘What is that the root
of 729?’ aren't philosophical; while ‘What is time?’ or ‘What may be a number?’
are. Discuss the concept of liberty in the writings of Isaiah Berlin. ‘What is that the purpose of human life?’ or ‘Are all men brothers?’ are
philosophical questions, while ‘Do most of such-and-such a gaggle of men
consider each other as brothers?’ or ‘What did Luther believe was the aim of
life?’ aren't .
Berlin related this view to Kant’s distinction between
matters of fact and people conceptual structures and categories that we use to
form sense of facts. Philosophy, worrying with questions that arise from our
attempts to form sense of our experiences, involves consideration of the
concepts and categories through which experience is perceived, organised and
explained.